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The Lost Names of 1913

It’s a fallacy that, in the sweet old days, baby names were conventional and “normal” — children were named Mary and John or, at the outer fringes of adventurism, Ethel and Irving.

The truth is that a century ago there were scores of invented names, names with kreeative spellings, surnames and words turned first names, gender crossovers, and trendy choices that were there today and gone — very very gone — tomorrow.

And then down toward the bottom of the Top 1000, below such oddities to our ears as Milburn and Mafalda, are names that seem eminently “normal,” even cool, in the modern world like Lilah and Reid, Lexie and Reese.
There’s a lot to study and write about in the 1913 baby name roster, but our focus today are the lost names of 1913 — those that show up on the Top 1000 then but are virtually unheard of now.

Of course, some of you may have heard of some of these names, most likely via an ancestor or a character in a long-ago book or film. But most of these names, with their 1913 rank in parentheses, have disappeared from use.